The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Google's relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years - it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: "It's Complicated". I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I'm going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation.

I'll move on to what that means we should be thinking about doing differently in the future, and am sharing a free link-building tool you can all try out to experiment with these ideas. The tool will allow you to see
who is linking to you rather than where is linking to you, and will provide you with social profiles for these authors, as well as details of where else they write.

To start I want to quickly look at a brief history of Google's view of links.

Are links less important than they were?

Back in the early days Google treated all links as being equal. A link in the footer was as good as a link in the main content, a link in bad content was as good as a link in good content, and so on. However, then the new generation of SEOs arrived and started 'optimizing' for links. The black hats created all sorts of problems, but the white hats were also manipulating the link graph. What this meant was now Google had to begin scrutinizing links to decide how trust-worthy they were.

Every link would be examined for various accompanying signals, and it would be weighted according to these signals. It was no longer a case of all links being equal. Reciprocal links began to have a diminished effect, links in footers were also not as powerful, and so it went for a variety of other signals. Over the last decade Google have begun using a wide range of new signals for determining the answer to the question they have to answer for every single link:
How much do we trust this link?

They've also introduced an increasing number of signals for evaluating pages beyond the link based signals that made them. If we look at the
ranking factors survey results from SEOmoz for 2011 we see that link based factors make up just over 40% of the algorithm. However, in the 2009 survey they were closed to 55% of the algorithm.

So in the last 2 years 15% of the algorithm that was links has been replaced by other signals in relative importance. The results are from a survey, but a survey with people who live and breathe this stuff, and it seems to match up well with what the community as a whole believes, and what we observe with the increasing importance of social signals and the like.

This reduction in the relative power of links seems to imply that Google aren't able to trust links as much as they once did. Whilst clear they are still the backbone of the algorithm, it is clear Google has been constantly searching for other factors to offset the 'over-optimization' that links have suffered from.

Are social signals the answer?

The SEO community has been talking a lot about social signals the last couple of years, and whether they are going to replace links. I'd argue that social signals can tell you a lot about trust, timeliness, perhaps authority and other factors, but that they are quite limited in terms of relevancy. Google still need the links - they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

To visualise this point in a different way, if we look at a toy example of the Web Graph. The
nodes represent websites (or webpages) and the connections between them as the links between these websites:

And a corresponding toy example of the Social Graph:

We can now visualise Social 'Votes' (be they likes/tweets/+1s/pins or shares of some other type) for different websites. We can see that
nodes on the Social Graph send their votes to nodes on the Web Graph:

The Social Graph is sending signals over to the websites. They are basically saying 'Craig likes this site', or 'Rand shared this page'. In other words, the social votes are signals about web sites/pages and not about the links -- they don't operate on the graph in the same manner as links.

Whilst social signals do give Google an absolute wealth of information, they don't directly help improve the situation with links and how some links are more trustworthy than others.

Putting the trust back into links

So Google have needed to find a way to provide people with the ability to improve the quality of a link, to verify that links are trust-worthy. I believe that verifying the author of a link is a fantastic way to achieve this, and it fits neatly into the model.

In June last year Google introduced rel author, the method that allows a web page to announce the author of the page by pointing to a Google+ profile page (which has to link back to the site for 2 way verification).

We're seeing the graphs merge into a new Web Graph augmented by author data, where some links are explicitly
authored links:

With this model it isn't: 'Distilled linked to SEOmoz' but it is 'Tom Anthony linked on Distilled to Rand Fishkin on SEOmoz'. It's the first time there has been a robust mechanism for this.

This is incredibly powerful for Google as it allows them to do exactly what I mentioned above - they can now verify the author of a web page. This gives two advantages:

Knowing this is an authored link, by a human who they have data about, they can place far more trust in a link. Its likely that a link authored manually by a human is of higher quality, and that a human is unlikely to claim responsibility for a link if it is spammy.

Furthermore it allows them to change the weighting of links according to the AuthorRank of the author who placed the link.

The latter point is very important, it could impact how links can pass link juice. I believe this will shift the link juice model towards:

I've shown it here as a simple multiplication (and without all the other factors I imagine go into this), but it highlights the main principle: authors with a higher AuthorRank (as determined by both their social standing and by the links coming into their authored pages, I'd imagine):

The base strength of the link still comes from the website, but Rand is a verified author who Google know a lot about and as he a strong online presence, so multiplies the power of links that he authors.

I'm a less well-known author, so don't give as much of a boost to my links as Rand would give. However, I still give links a boost over anonymous authors, because Google now trust me a bit more. They know where else I write, that I'm active in the niche, and socially etc.

Where to Who

So what does all this imply that you do? The obvious things are ensuring that you (and your clients) are using authorship markup, and of course you should try to become trustable in the eyes of Google. However, if you're interested in doing that stuff, you probably were already doing it.

The big thing is that we need a shift in our mindset from
where we are getting links from to who we are getting links from. We need to still do the traditional stuff, sure, but we need to ask start thinking about ‘who’ more and more. Of course, we do that some of the time already. Distilled noticed when Seth Godin linked to our Linkbait Guide. I noticed when Bruce Schneier linked to me recently, but we need to begin doing this all in a scalable fashion.

With OpenSiteExplorer, Majestic and many other linkbuilding tools we have a wide array of tools that allow us to look at where we are getting links from in a scalable way.

I hope I've managed to convince you that we need to begin to examine this from the perspective that Google increasingly will be. We need tools for looking at who is linking to who. Here's the thing - all the information we need for this is out there. Let me show you...

Authored links - A data goldmine

We'll examine an example post from GIanluca Fiorelli that he posted in December. Gianluca is using Google's authorship markup to highlight he is the author of this post.

Lets take a look at what information we can pull out from this markup.

The rel author attribute in the HTML source of the page points to his Google+ page, from there we can establish a lot of details about Gianluca:

We can from his Google+ profile establish where Gianluca lives, his bio, where he works etc. We can also get an indicator of his social popularity from the number of Circles that he is in, but also by following examining the other social profiles that he might link to (for example following the link to his Twitter profile and seeing how many Twitter followers he has).

We've talked a lot in the industry in the last couple of years about identifying influencers in a niche, and about building relationships with people. Yet, there is an absolute abundance of information available about authors of links we or our competitors already have --
why are we not using it!?!

All of this data can be crawled and gathered automatically, exactly in the way that Google crawls the authorship markup, which allows us to begin thinking about building the scalable sorts of tools I have mentioned. In the absence of any tools, I went right ahead and built one...

AuthorCrawler - A tool for mining Author Data for Linkbuilding

I first unveiled this tool a couple of weeks ago at
LinkLove London, but I'm pleased to release it publicly today. (As an aside, if you like getting exclusive access to cool toys like this then you should check out SearchLove San Fran in June or MozCon in July).

AuthorCrawler is a free, open-source tool that pulls the backlinks to a URL, crawls the authorship markup on the page, and gives you a report of who is linking to a URL. It is fully functional, but it is a proof-of-concept tool, and isn't intended to be an extensive or robust solution. However, it does allow us to get started experimenting with this sort of data in a scalable way.

When you run the report, you'll get something similar to this example report (or take a look at the
interactive version) I ran for SEOmoz.org:

It pulls the top 1000 backlinks for the homepage, and then crawled each of them looking for authorship markup, which if found is followed to crawl for the authors data (no. Circles, Twitter followers), and very importantly it also pulls the 'Contributes to' field from Google+ so you can see where else this author writes. It might be that you find people linking to your site that also write elsewhere, on maybe more powerful sites, so these are great people to build a relationship with - they are already aware of you, warm to you (they're already linking) and could provide links from other domains.

You can sort the report by the PA/DA of where the link was placed, or by the social follower counts of the authors. You can also click through to the authors Google+ and Twitter profiles to quickly see what they're currently up to.

I'm pretty excited by this sort of report and I think it opens up some creative ideas for new approaches to building both links and relationships. However, I still felt we could take this a little bit further.

I'm sure many of you will know the
link intersect tool, in the labs section of SEOmoz. It allows you to enter your URL, and the URLs of other domains in your niche (most likely your competitors, but not necessarily), and it examines the back links to each of these and reports on domains/pages that are linking to multiple domains in your niche. It also reports whether you currently have a link from that page - so you can quickly identify some possible places to target for links. Its a great tool!

So, I took the principle from the link intersect tool and I applied the authorship crawling code to create an Author Intersect tool. It will give you a report that looks like this (you can check the interactive
example report also):

Now what you have is really cool - you have a list of people who are writing about your niche, who are possibly linking to your competitors, whose social presence you can also see at a glance. These are great people to reach out to build relationships with - they are primed to link to you!

The tool is pretty simple to use - if you're unsure there is an
instructions page on the site to get you started.

Wrap Up

We are in the early days of authorship, but I think Google are going to keep on pushing Google+ hard, and I think authorship's importance is just going to increase. Correspondingly - I think tools such as this re going to become an increasing part of an SEOs toolkit in the next 12 months, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

I've only just begun to dig into the ways we can use tools like these - so I'd love to hear from others what they get up to with it. So go and
download the tool and try it out. Have fun! :)

About Tom-Anthony —
Tom is Head of R&D at Distilled, which focuses on a variety of areas, including spending time looking at technology trends. He is currently writing up his thesis for a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. Follow him on Twitter: @TomAnthonySEO or Google+, or read his blog.

But, as Peter in his comment, I have some doubts about it because of the mainstremn adoption of the and the correct use of the "Contributor to" section of the Google profile. Just doing a search you can find so many "How to". Let say, it is not really a "basic" implementation to do for a not professional.

Said that, I would like to ask you what's your take about the rel publisher, as it is - imho - almost equally important as the in marking the AuthorRank relevancy, but for an Enthity like a site is.

Well - the problem with 'Contributer to' was they added it in later, when lots of people had jumped on the band-wagon already. However, I do agree that implementation isn't as straightforward as it should be, but they are working hard on simplifying it. Furthermore, I expect there will be an ongoing increase in plugins for most of the major platforms as it all becomes more established.

Currently the uptake of the rel=author markup outside of the tech industry is still pretty low, but I think we'll see that slowly increasing also. I imagine the mainstream journalism sites will all get on board.

With regards to rel publisher -- that is an excellent question. I don't think any effect will be as strong as I expect from rel author. The most common scenario online is for a company ('publisher') to have a single website, so in many cases rel publisher doesn't give Google much additional information because the entity it represents is mostly represented by this single website (not true for authors).

However, I think it'll likely be used to tie authors together with publishers and one another, and I imagine it'll also be help as companies begin to be represented in multiple places online.

In regards to rel=publisher it would seem that's fine for a brand that creates and publishes content to their site, such as video. However, as that content is distributed/syndicated and engaged with on different sites, would rel=author be more appropriate when the content is not on the brand's site?

Thanks for the excellent article and awesome new SEO tool Tom!
I have one question though: As AuthorRank becomes a larger part of Google's ranking algorithm, is it a smarter move for companies to establish a social media champion and have them post all their blog posts instead of multiple individuals with varying AuthorRanks?

The thing is but in the end of the day if you work with a corporate site you will need to have various people who have a following using the blog to keep it interesting if you only have 1 person then the content could be the same, people like things been different. You could even use the Zappos methadology and split up the various blogs with various people.

Or another idea you can do as an example you have a brand with 1 blog you split the users using various various Rel Author attributes:

- CEO posts on the blog (using their author rank)

- Brand Marketing person posts on blog (using their author rank)

- Social Media person posts on the blog using their author rank)

- You can even get suppliers posting on the blog (using their author rank)

Of course all content needs to be checked and approved by a content person too.

Dave I think it will just involve making a face, look at the guy from the will it blend videos, he was an example of a company which sold blenders with no brand face, suddenly they created a new branding face from nothing.

With regards to the simpler method for authorship: I commend Google for being agile on this and trying to make it easier for people. However, I have my concerns about email based method, because it isn't crawlable by tools such as AuthorCrawler. It moves authorship even more towards being a Google property that other engines/services will never be able to hook into. I'd like to see authorship become something that can be tied into other identity services and not just Google+, and to be crawlable to everyone.

Luckily, the email method doesn't seem to have seen wide uptake, as people aren't overly keen about using their email address publicly like that.

Actually, the email address does not need to be public. Once you confirm an email address using a specific domain (i.e. - tom@distilled.com) and place that domain in the Contributor to section, then Google is simply looking for a match on the author name in the byline.

I've been meaning to update my Authorship post to discuss this new method of validation.

The public visibility of the email value in the G+ profile is not determinant for Authorship verification. In Google Plus, on your Edit profile page, it's only after you click into the Work box when editing it, that the visibility option appears just above the blue Save button. So you can alter it to 'Your Circles' for example or however granular you wish. I think Google perhaps are not explicit enough each time they make Authorship announcements.

Call me a skeptic, but I have some concerns with much of the hype around AuthorRank, or more appropriately, AgentRank...

1. What percentage of web content is truly authored? This is a difficult question to ask, but it will be hard for Google to consider AgentRank as a strong signal when much of the web is not "authored", but "generated" or "published".

2. While AgentRank addresses the association of fractions of page content to specific digital signatures (ie: multiple authorship), there is no way to direct a search user to those specific Agent-Verified sections of the page without an HTML anchor being in place.

3. Of the authored content, only a small fraction of it will be correctly linked, leading to errors and ommissions.

I am not saying that it is impossible for AgentRank to have a profound impact on rankings, rather that its impact will be constrained by the above principles.

I suspect this is a matter of degree. Each extra factor - AuthorRank, etc. - makes it a bit more difficult to spoof the graph. So AuthorRank isn't a revolution - it's a next step. If you look at how Google's changed over the last several years from big updates (remember Florida?) to continuous ones (will Panda ever be 'over'?) it makes AuthorRank seem plausible as an additional feature.

I do agree that it can have an impact, just that it will be significantly constrained. Perhaps more importantly, I think the cross-domain authorship question is largely a non-issue. The primary method by which AgentRank could have a profound impact would be as a substitution for link equity - ie: a writer can transfer his or her value to a non-authority domain, such that if Rand posted on a no-name's SEO blog, it could still rank despite the fact that the domain itself lacks much authority. This, of course, only matters if the blog post itself couldn't acquire links on its own. Guest posts tend to do fine on their own, without such a level of attribution.

I merely think that our focus on AgentRank is too heavy handed at this point.

You don't actually need that much content to be truly authored to use AuthorRank. The AgentRank patents outline ways in which non-authored content can obtain AuthorRank through links from those with high AuthorRank.

In short, Authorship helps to curate the link graph.

There's usually at least one (and usually many) in a vertical or topic who will have authorship implemented and can be relied upon to help provide a balance to traditional link metrics.

Multi-author content will prove more difficult but is something I think Google will iterate upon as they look to implement AuthorRank.

Am I missing something here? If I am correct, the only thing Google gains is the rare situation in which an author links from a non-valuable link source.

Think about it this way - nearly every social metric right now is represented with a link. If i tweet something, it creates a link to the twitter resource. If I retweet something, it creates a link back to the original tweeter. If I follow someone, it shows up as a link in my followed list. If I share just about anything on any open social network, a link is created to represent that connection. Google can already follow these links (regardless of whether or not you use nofollow or try to obscure them with javascript) to build the natural link graph. In fact, one could argue that the majority of the social graph is already subsumed by the link graph. Author rank really does not provide much of a benefit in these cases as the persona's reputation is already represented in PageRank. If an "Agent" with high reputation linked from one of these sources, the value in that link should already be represented in PR. The rare case where Google benefits from this is a situation where the Agent is linking from a disreputable source (such as a no-name blog or unknown social network). I can't see this having the huge impact which people are claiming AgentRank to have.

The one scenario I could see would be the ability to segment social sites into users, essentially treating each user as a hostname (ie: unique linking domains = unique linking personas). However, AgentRank would be really awkward way of going about this.

In my opinion, and I am normally not one to support a "conspiracy theory", the rel=author link back to Google+ is a link play, pure and simple. Google+ now has more link authority than gmail, google groups, etc. They are squarely in the top 100 now of the Majestic Million - all because SEOs think linking to their G+ profile will improve their rankings.

I think you're missing the idea that identity is core to AuthorRank. Twitter? Who knows who those people are and how they might have acquired 'influence' or if they even have influence.

Do we think that the hoards of robotweets for, say Mashable, are all valid? Or that when Seth Godin farts in a blog post and people trip over themselves to share it (before reading it) that all of that is somehow conveying real trust and authority?

We really think that PageRank is a great representation of true trust and authority? It's pretty easy to manipulate through brute force SEO, right?

The links from people with high AuthorRank (wherever they might be) will count more while those with low AuthorRank will count less or not at all.

Those blog networks that don't have authorship, suddenly they could count for very little. MFA sites that currently outrank legitimate passion based sites (who haven't gone out and astroturfed) would find themselves on the short-end of the stick.

Domain diversity might mean substantially less if all of the links from those domains are of low or no AuthorRank.

In short, AuthorRank is the check and balance needed against PageRank. It's not what links to you, or how many, but also who links to you.

Do we think that the hoards of robotweets for, say Mashable, are all valid?

Yes, yes we do. This was the beauty of the PageRank algorithm. The rankings influence of each tweet (assuming Google ignores the nofollows) is directly proportional to the number of inbound links to the poster, which are largely generated by retweets, followers, and natural links to his/her profile. In fact, I would argue that the link graph in the social space is much cleaner than others, because a huge number of those links are generated by social interactions. How many times in the non social-world have you linked to Rand? How many times have you responded to one of his tweets or Google+ posts?

Seth Godin farts in a blog post and people trip over themselves to share it (before reading it) that all of that is somehow conveying real trust and authority?

Actually, this exactly the kind of manipulation we will expect. Guys like Godin with huge authority can manipulate the hell out of rankings. If AgentRank succeeds as you all explain, we will have constricted the rankings influence graph to an oligarchy of talking heads and authors.

We really think that PageRank is a great representation of true trust and authority?

Absolutely not, but it is damn close, especially considering a 10 years + worth of improvements and tweaks leading to a search engine that has squashed the competition time and time again.

Those blog networks that don't have authorship, suddenly they could count for very little.

Clearly we couldn't add authorship tags to them and create social media personas, because that has never been used to bring a ranking algorithm to its knees (cough Digg cough).

In short, AuthorRank is teh check and balance needed against PageRank. It's not what links to you, or how many, but also who links to you.

I bet you love that line; it slips off the tongue so nicely you just have to believe it. First, who links to you already matters and it is already represented in the link graph. If I get a link from Rand on nearly any social platform, it is going to be more valuable than some random guy just because of the link juice that tends to flow into his profiles. Rand doesn't need to link to Google for Google to know that his profile is important. Second, organizing content by who writes it has a far more direct benefit to Google - manipulating search results so that they show content written by people you follow on Google+. This alone is a far easier implementation for Google, doesn't require reinventing the wheel, and explains why they would implement this without needing to go on and on about AgentRank.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Upon publication, having 78 Tweets sent by robots is not an indication of anything except a manipulation of social proof.

Seth will continue to have a high AuthorRank. But that's not because of Google. That's because lots of people still think he walks on water. I just happen to think he's been mailing it in for the last four years.

When enough people come around to my way of thinking his AuthorRank will go down. The idea is that this type of influence is tough to acquire but easy to lose. It's certainly some sort of attempt to reflect those who have jumped the shark.

And no, you wouldn't be able to create a persona and add authorship tags and accomplish your goals. Authorship is about identity and confidence. Google has a fairly good understanding of what a 'real' profile looks like versus a manufactured one by looking at the digital wake that person leaves on the Internet.

If who links to you already mattered very little of the brute force link building efforts would have any impact. There's be no real benefit to blog networks or astroturfing communities.

So we'll just have to be on different sides of this issue. I think the link graph is powerful but AuthorRank will help to make it far more accurate. As an aside, I've definitely linked to posts by Rand more often than I've responded to him on social networks.

What AJ said, Russ. But I agree with you this is way overblown regarding it's importance to SEO. Authorship is primarily about branding and is similar to what's done on a social network, it's about increasing brand equity, in this case the "brand of me," as a verified author. Personally, I haven't seen a bit of SEO benefit since I got verified 4 months ago. Higher CTR? Yes, very much. Higher reputation and a face-behind-content that personalizes me. Yes, very much so.

I see Google giving extra juice in the future. I'm verifying more than just the Google acct in Goog+. Once my Goog account is verified by the two way linking, there are other accts, such as Linkedin, that I've verified from my Goog acct.

Russ - you make some great points, and I think Google probably are (trying) to do the type of crawling of social media based links that you mention.

However, I have to disagree - I think AgentRank/AuthorRank is something Google are going to use heavily (and the cynic in me imagines they could purposely overpower it - see below), but I think the two main points that are missing in your model:

1) 2-way verification that an entity purporting to represent a certain Author is actually from that Author.

2) Non-social. Previously a blog post on SEOmoz wasn't linked (certainly not in any consistent or robust fashion) to a particular Author. Having that knowledge in a trust-worthy format allows analysis of both in and outbound links.

My 'conspiracy theory' part more points towards:

1) Google are an OpenID provider, yet the only Identity Service available for authors is Google+.

2) They are now pushing the email-based 2-way verification, which is the method that isn't crawlable (by tools like AuthorCrawler, or other search engines).

Brin talks about the 'open web' but here they are trying hard to tie authors in to Google, and make this additional layer of data inaccessible to others.

That Google is pushing a non-crawlable method doesn't convince me. If they were interested in hiding these kinds of tricks, they probably would have done the same with nofollow.

The two way verification is extremely flawed since it is still tied to a domain (ie: I verify that I contribute to a domain upon which content is posted). This leaves a whole for anyone else who publishes to that domain (or vandalizes with spam or hacking) to gain authorship cred. If Google really wanted to control this, they could have simply given an interface where, once logged in, a person could submit their URL to Google, and that URL would have the verification on it.

Finally, and most importantly by far, we can still buy links from sites and authors with strong AgentRank. Instead of high PageRank domains, we buy high AgentRank posts. Even better, the high AgentRank poster doesn't even have to post to his own blog and risk his reputation. He can post it to your blog, or a brand new site altogether, and we still get the benefit. This sounds AWESOME. I take everything I said back. Please Mr. Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, make AgentRank happen today. Pretty Please. I promise it will work out well for you.

I must admit I do agree with you. I dont believe we're being sceptical, just looking at it realistically.
Don't get me wrong Tom the post is fab and the principles are brill and I've also learnt a lot from this post but there's always going to be a "way round" these kind of tags for the following reason:
Take Panda for example, duplicate content is a very "visible" thing if that makes sense? As is invaluable content, rubbish title tags, spun text etc etc. whereas setting up Google Plus networks purposely to build author rank has more of a logical formula to it(again if that makes sense? :-) )
Don't get me wrong I think it will take a good SEO company/person to be successful at it and it's no where near a simple as "buy links with page rank and you will rank" however given there are already companies out there selling Google+ I reckon black hatters will be onto it like nobodies business :-)

Over here at The GadgetPlex we look at linkbuilding in a very specific way - has a link been validated by social metrics? This was a key point for us before authorship - has this webpage been validated by real users.

We'd find that, as a rule of thumb, new inbound links felt like they were having a greater impact on SEO rankings when they were surrounded by a swarm of social activity. As the proliferation of authorship markup improves around teh web, I hope to be able to validate this further with "has the link been editorially placed by a whitelisted author" check.

So I'm seeing all of this as a validation - the more additional signals the better.

Just as a final note, I had a good chat with James Carson at BrightonSEO and really enjoyed exploring the idea of building an in-agency content team who are validated experts in a reange of verticals.

Hi Tom, Great post I think authorship of content is going to be huge in the future the only area that lies of doubt will be how google treats old websites (highly authority) or government sites who do not use these functions, I can not see these sites been dropped quickly from the ranks and then author based content comming up.

I think the social graph is going to be a huge element in linkbuilding but I think it will take a while for it to truely be the sole basis for SEO as we know it. I still think the core elements of linke building from quality elements will be strong, social authorship will supplement this.

I recently gave a presentation on how to use the top 8 global Social Media websites for Linkbuilding and it was well recieved, whilst some of the crowd doubted the social element (no follow) of link building I still feel it is only going to get bigger and better, join that with author ship and quality content and it will be hard to stop.

Excellent point James...and awesome post Tom, looking forward to trying out the tool!

James you bring up a very valid point as to why Google Authorship and "AuthorRank" will have a tough time becoming a reliable link evaluation method. I think we've seen some good examples of how AuthorRank is already affecting the SERPS in many cases.

While it won't replace the importance of links, here's the opportunity...budding journalists or college journalism majors, START your blogs NOW, start building authorrank up. That will likely become an asset that can follow you for throughout your career, and big news agencies will likely hire you and pay you hansomely if you can author content that ranks well based on your authorrank!

Great work Tom! I believe the next era is social but I always disagree in meet-ups and seminars that forcing people to believe that social is the next link building and traditional link building will go away…

I believe social is going to get more and more importance (Google is investing their big dollars in to it) but this will synchronize and strengthen the current link building process!

I can truly agree that it seems to be one of the must use tool in the coming months…

Agree, I feel Google will work out a way to use traditional backlink building with social elements to move forward with the index. I mean you will still be in business if you are link building but you will have to come up with new strategies to utalize more a social element.

I mean take this case for example: You have a highly authority Gov or EDU site with great content yet they do not wish to add the author tag. Mashable.com (high use of social elements yet lower use of content due to traffic and social sharing, the general public always shares like crazy on the site) yet they will want to add the author tag becuase they are all over social. I think if Mashable outranks the highly authority Gov or EDU site it will cause out cry within the gneral public wouldnt you say, this type of thing will cause a huge shake up in the ranks?

This is the reasoning behind the fact I can not see them totally taking down links as a factor, dont get me wrogn social/author ship will be strong but it will not be the only factor.

Great post, one of the clearest and easiest to follow that I have come across to date. It affirms much of what I've been noticing over the past couple of months once I started hooking up my social networks with my G+ profile.Interesting that Google.com has implemented more of the social signal related changes than .co.uk (for example, 'more by' is missing in .co.uk results) - I assume this will be rolled out in stages.Ruth

Very interesting post. My main thought around this comes down to adoption. This only works if a large % of the web is using the author markup. If only a very small percentage of sites have the markup, it makes it incredibly difficult for Google to use this a a factor. It's the same issue with Google +. Industries like our may use author markup, but others don't. If you are selling kids toys for example, how many sites about that subject are actually using the markup?

I like the overall concept of of applying more in terms of evalualting how much weight a page should pass.

I agree. I think this is something that will fully apply maybe five years down the road. Although, in web terms, who knows what will be going on by then. By the time you get something implemented, there's something new to replace it.

There's probably something about this that I'm not quite getting, but I am the single author for my company's blog and I don't want my face plastered on every post we have. Can I still get credit for authoring these posts?

"Knowing this is an authored link, by a human who they have data about, they can place far more trust in a link."

Interesting insight, but I think it makes perfect sense. A real human author that contributes a lot of content to their field is going to be a much more trusted source than a generic website with little value. It will be interesting to see how authorship impacts SEO. It definitely makes content marketing that much more important.

Having read it again I was wondering how transient authorship works. If I work for company x and author articles and build up a trusted authorship in the eyes of Google what happens when I leave company x? With the current model I would carry the author 'goodness' with me, but what happens to company x?

Is the content of a company website more relevant than the authors or the other way around? It will be interesting to see where this goes...

This is a great post, Tom. I think the people that summarily dismiss Google+ as "just another social network" are missing the point big time. There's still a long road ahead until there's enough adoption and critical mass to make this part of the algorithm more reliable than other parts of it (probably due in part to concerns voiced above by russvirante), but you clearly articulated what AgentRank (or whatever it will be known as) may mean for the future of link building. Great post!

Excellent read, very informative! It had not occured to me before that rel=author would play a role in link value, but it definitely makes sense. I'm looking forward to trying out your tool. We have not had much success with link building tools over the years, but this is certainly a much different approach.

Awesome tool, Tom, thank you so much. There's a lot of food for thought in your article.

How will Google handle the difference between people posting as individuals and as part of a larger business? What if I would like to get some personal credit for the things I do under a corporate mantle? What about sites that can't or refuse to include authorship information or are too slow to change their information when contributors change? Is there a scale of author authority depending on the subject they talk about/link to? And, of course, are we really happy to hand the SERPs over to organisations that have the resources to be more and more active across the web? Especially when it comes to local queries, I prefer a less web savy small businesses to a directory like yelp...

Good post. It answered some of my questions and likewise confirmed some of my thoughts and suspicions regarding authorship. Google is certainly trying to establish and strong link between content and author. I guess one of the key factors is gaining crediblity as an author. At any rate, this is certainly a clear direction of the future.

Wow - What a well commented article! Unfortunately haven't had time to read all comments - great article by the way. My question regarding authorship relates to the very real 'reality' that no one stays in a job forever. Does that not mean that author rank can be passed from one company to another (one site to another) and our salary effectively becomes determined on our valuable author rank?Whilst unlikey to happen this way - in what can will author rank or authorship realistically govern ranking? I do believe it will I'm just not clear how at the moment. I'll give it more thought and get back to the thread. :-)

Great post Tom, I loved the images you used to explain your points in the article. I like the way this new aspect is going in terms of Author Authority, it seems a very interesting development that I'll definately be following in more detail as time goes on.

It is for the first time I am hearing that authorship has a role in link building. Now Google authorship has more to SEO besides the CTR in search results. I have not yet created authorship to my blog http://blogseoads.com/ By reading this article I have started my work for creating authorship to my blogs. Thanks for the useful information.

How does a company best set up multiple authors? Individual Google+ accounts or can we add authors and different log ins to the same company Google Plus page? Or, do we tie it all back to our company blog profiles but then how do those get attributed for discussion groups, etc? And, to the question above from 3mobile, what happens when staff turns over and that Google+ profile goes away?

And as for rel publisher, since Authorship came out we can say that using Rel+Pub helped move us up the serps (but only ever by a spot at the most) comparing it to Rel-Author and the CTR pay off from +author worked only where it seems as though the page could have an opinion piece. Think there will be an almighty G-Slap for publishers using Auth were Auth not ought to be used. For the CTR they hope to achieve. Stick to Pub and add video for the CTR, unless Google soon add the avatars for Publisher and then we're back to brand and the richest people in the world will be those who can create beauty within 50x50 pixel box!

Anybody having issues running the tool?I've entered both APIs in the config files, installed PHP 5.3, checked my Path (currently: C:\Program Files\PHP\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Intel\DMIX;C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Shared)When I try to run the tool from the command line, it gives me the following message: 'php' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.Not sure what I missed or what I'm doing wrong :(

Interesting approach and execution. I haven't been able to run it end to end yet as one page keeps timing out (even though max execution time is 120 seconds). When I load the page manually, it loads fine. Not sure what the deal is with that. I am going to put a 1-off clause that if that domain pops up again it ignores it and continues along. try/catch doesn't work, but that's intention in PHP.

Thanks!

<edit> 1-off clause for a specific domain that never resolves isn't a permanent solution, but isn't even working in my test. There are too many links that never resolve. I will dig deeper and see if I can find a cURL option to handle this.

Excellent post! I am looking forward to trying out your tool. Everybody says different things about social signs but there is no clear directions on what social signs are or what strategy to implement to get benefit from social signs. We all think about fans, followers and make our content easy to share, we all want to get many followers, but is that really working? Does that have any weigh in google algo really? Hands up those who can demonstrate that. I can't. I still think that there is a little bit of a myth around the social networks helping google rankings and it is a really obscure subject. However, what you suggest on your post makes total sense. It is an excellent way also for google to potentiate their authorship functionality and their social network.

Read through the comments, but didn't exactly find an answer. I do online marketing for an organization. I also administer social media pages linked to a generic corporate account rather than using one that is mine. I want to start positioning us to take advantage of changes in authorship, but I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about this. Using personal accounts to run official social accounts is discouraged where I work. They want everyone to use a generic corporate account (Xcorp@gmail rather than SteveStevenson@gmail.com would control company google +, facebook, twitter). Is this a bad policy? Should I be using my personal accounts and gaining from the efforts I put into blogging/publishing on behalf of my company to build my own authorship? I'm struggling with this. Hope someone could give perspective on it for me.

Not disputing anything anyone is saying here. Only commenting that grading based on Social Engagement seems to require more and more time spent online being social leaving less time for being social in person.....

A great article Tom - Not that I disagree with you - In a perfect world I think it would make sense and work well, but I don't think Google will have an easy run of this for numerous reasons.1/. Anti G+ centimentGoogle is using strong arm tactics to get people to adopt G+, rather like putting a gun to the head of anyone who wants to make a living off the internet. It's a common thought even among the SEO community that the only reason they use G+ is because it can have a positive impact on SEO - IE extra burden of work just to please the great Google gods. This is not a good way to run any business, and get people on your side - if SEO's think like this, how do you think Joe Public feels? Joe Public is not adopting it yet, but if/when they feel they are forced to, I think the negative centiment against google could esculate dramatically and they would jump like lemmings if there was a "Less Evil" and viable alternative.I think Google are on the edge of stepping over the mark with G+, and google has gone from being a company where they created great free tools to a company who is startig to look somewhat sinister - something along the lines of the Child Catcher - providing a line of free sweets till your hooked, and suddenly, to late, you realise its just all a clever ploy to get what they really want. 2/. Its to dam complexNot for SEO's but for Joe public with their blog or mini website it is. The whole email authorisation thing is all a bit farcicle - especialy if you write for many websites. Even the rel author tag is complex for the average Joe and its just another thing that get in the way of what it all should be about - making great content.3/. Googles "Ownership"Again this comes back to the negative sentiment thing - I don't think the average blogger really appreciates it that "Google" controls this. If it was independant and universal I think people would be more open to it.

4/. Facebook advantageI believe google have set up G+ not as a competitor to FB, but because they have realised that they are at a distinct disadvantage to FB when it comes to personal data, and how that data can be used to make better search over just a pure link based graph. So google is peddling like mad to get this info before FB can release a SE to rival their own which uses all their user data. Because FB is much more widely adopted and used, I think they could, if they wanted make something much more simple and userfriendly with regard to authorship, by use of something similar to a like (author) button which gets validated by the FB admin.

Nice post, Tom. The discussion in the comments above about manipulating author rank were really useful as well. I'm sold on authorship being an important signal going forward. It's another piece of the puzzle for building a strong online brand/identity.

The two worlds of real life networks and linkbuilding are slowly merging. I forsee our smartphones or personal devices will play a role in this. Eventually our website's link profiles will be weighted on how many people you have met/conversed with in real life, and what those people have said about you.

There will be no more hiding behind your fake social profile and pretending to be something you aren't. Has anyone ever seen the Internet Tough Guy picture?

I am new(ish) to SEO and still getting my head around a lot of things, but based on this blog post, would you say its a wise idea for web designers to start (if they have not already done so) in using author markup?

Tom, It was great reading your post. Before your post I read about Authorship (rel=author) on Google Blog but your post has gave me more infomartion about Authorship and Google+. Special Thanks for the Tool

Great post - makes a lot of sense, I think this is really going to significantly change the way in which we carry out our marketing. I can imagine clients telling me that they don't want to show the authorship of a page because it puts too much strength in the hands of an individual, as in this method builds up the strength and reputation of individuals who are then free to take this to another business - this is different to the way people take their training and experience to another business with them. Nice tool btw I'm going to download it now and give it a try!

2) I imagine they are probably testing this, and think they'll scale it up in the coming months. That is based on the experience of myself and the other SEOs I've discussed this with, Google's history, and our observations of clients. I don't have any hard evidence, but we often don't in SEO!

3) 100 might be a bit extreme, but I imagine posting on several well-regarded websites that are 2-way linked with your Google+ profile will be a signal to the value of an author, yes.

I mentioned 100 for a reason, I could have mentioned 5 or 10 may be, I mentioned 100 becuase my main concern is that the authorship factor will be very easily manipulated through the guest postings.

A person running guest post campaign can easily include a linkback to his Google profile with a "?rel=author" at the end and enter the site in contributor section of profile, and in a day or so he can have a list of 100 sites where he is contributing thus making him a super star of authorship world... Dont you think its super easy to spam and manipulate? I would like to hear your views on this.

In that case your either linked to 100 quality relivent articles and will get the authorship you deserve, or your linked to 100 low quality ones and your rank goes down. At least if google gets it right.

We never know with Google. For all that we're talking about it, they may already be creating or sharpening a Google Panda Update specifically aimed for the rel=author mark-up.

That fictional Panda Update for rel=author may work by crawling the hundreds of guest posts/authored content/contributed website and check a variety of values like how they would check a link/article farm.

Again, it may be fictional now but it may also become real in the coming months especially with how Google is rolling out local/global updates monthly.

It seems that Google has become smart with the passage of time. What I feel after reading this content is that people can no longer play with search engine algorithm. Another thing that is important is that social signals are becoming more important than link metrics and webmasters should do a lot to leverage social media metrics and signals.

Google is always getting smarter as time passes. ;) That doesn't mean it's a game to play but simply that we have to keep learning and finding the right strategy to build a strong site that will weather the changes.

This post definitely forces us to think about how Google intends to use authorship as a relevency tool. I'm skeptical that it will be widely adopted as a strong search signal for these reasons:1) It's too tied to individual authorship and industries like SEO where creating a brand around a single individual is the goal. 2) Seems easy to manipulate. Who will be the first adopters? SEO experts. Who will be second? Our clients. It doesn't feel natural.3) This change makes Google searches an insulated community where Google+ factors too strongly influence the SERPS.

I find this to be an extremely interesting topic. It forces the link builder to "lay claim" to every backlink produced. Links should become more natural as time progresses, but what will happen to links from sites that are not authored? Will they be degraded or not valued?

Very interesting stuff. I've been using the authorship tag on all my sites for a while now....I have one question though....how do you figure out the Author Rank as determined above for those two individuals? Just trying to see where my profile stands. Thank you

Great post! I definitely agree with the overall idea. As we've all seen, SEO is now more about people. Google is working harder now than ever to give the highest rank to the sites that provide the best user experience. Thanks for the article!

I got my Google Authorship approved for my blog yesterday, but only it display to my pages in Search Results, none of my posts display it. Will it take time to display to all posts? DO YOU THINK IT IS A PROBLEM? Thanks

Just like Google+, rel author will be so skewed toward the SEO community that it will be mostly used by SEOs/smart webmasters and therefore leaves big gaps in information about the web and leaves too much room for SEOs to use this markup to manipulate SERPs.

Think about Twitter and the poor predictor of large followers to popularity. Sure celebs and important personalities have big followers generally, but so do millions of phoneys who game their follower count.

Also the rel author markup will at best have a pretty limited utilization. Surely this can be helpful information for Google to use, but if the number of trusted link sources goes from 10 million to 10,000 - the rarity of these sorts of links is going to be so high it would make it hard for Google to properly rank less common queries.

I think this is an important trend to watch and be ready for but at best I think these links will just be more powerful than normal links but not a replacement.

Fascintating post and comments! AuthorRank isn't something I've researched that thoroughly but my gut reaction is that rel author isn't going to be something widely used outside the SEO community at least for a long time. A lot like Google+, which just has not taken off with most people.

This is a very thought-provoking article. I completely agree that the merging of social and links is coming, and the Authorship seems to be a critical first step. It would seem that Google+ now has a compelling reason to exist, and this may even be a way-too-early indicator of killing off content farms by reducing anonymous content.

This is a very interesting article and useful for us web designers. I just downloaded this tool, but will have to consult with my colleagues on how to upload it to check out where my linkers are coming from on my website and others too. I think that by tracking our linkers we will find out fantastic information for spammers and others that want to really communicate with us on our forum, but are not geeks and mean well. Great information!

I think the recent abundance of social signals adds a much-needed layer of reliability to the link graph, and gives the search engines more variety in their signals, which is annoying for us SEO -types but ultimately does help the searcher get better results. This effect, combined with Google's always-improving ability to sift out bad content, should improve search overall moving foward, and give black-hat types a much less efficient means of diverting traffic their way. The smart, strong, and popular will survive, at the expense of those just out for short-term gain.

We all knew the social layer was coming. Great post! Hopefully Google is able to use this new signal to help the best content reach the top of the SERPS. I just hoped that social (Google +), doesn't falls victim to being easily gamed somehow.

I have to say, I think people are making wayyyyy too big a deal of authorship. Would it help improve the focus of the link-graph? Absolutely. Will it be an effective tool for 99% of websites online? Probably not.

The problem with authorship, in particular the authorship markup is that, the more widespread it becomes, the less reliable it's going to be. People are only going to use it if they are incentivized to do so and they aren't going to give up that incentive just because the original author has moved on.

You can't escape the logic that most of the sites that would be smart enough to take advantage of something like this will be smart enough to take steps that will preserve any traffic benefit they get and at the same time (unintentionally) undo the purpose of authorship data in the first place.

I am not DR SEO, but I can tell you the future failure of the system of synthetic social media. Just like buying links we are going to have a run up of false social media popularity. What google fails to understand = everytime they tweak something people just learn it and deliver synthetic results. There is no way around it. They can look at bounce rate, sodical media, back links, content, etc, but so can the SEO GODS. All Google is doing is making the SEO GODs richer by forcing new business practices to be used to rank in the top 5 of google. In turn, they are alienating the little fish and leaving only room for the big fish to play, since the little fish cannot afford it. In my business this means Zillow, Yahoo, Trulia, Realtor.com, and a few others will own the 1st page. Hence, forcing us little fish to fight for PPC. Then I would say the Medium fish will win the war on PPC.

Really interesting article. I do not completely agree though with the idea of a future authoredpagerank. This may work very well in a sector whith lots of news created like SEO itself. It can easily be manipulated in areas which arent so competitive. Companies can pay a couple of writers with authority and give their links a boost. Or one person can create diferent profiles with authority. It´s not so hard to create a profile after all!

After a while it will be just another version of the link manipulation going on today.

I think it will actually be extremely difficult to effectively manipulate these sorts of signals. I'm not saying it will be impossible, but it will be cumbersome and difficult to an extent that makes it unprofitable.

As Google+ is tied to a Google account, Google have access to a plethora of data which they can use to ascertain validity - from how many emails an account receives, to what the individual has watched on YouTube and how often they have logged in over the past few months.

For an authored signal to pass any additional strength, that account will have to be genuine and highly authoritative. While you can always pay some individuals to write stuff for you, the individuals that will really help to boost the quality of a link will be the one's that have reputation, a fanbase and a history of integrity in their writing -- the one's you typically can't buy promotion from.

And maybe that new privacy policy they implemented, which we all thought was so intrusive, was actually partly inspired by tracking user activity to weed out which profiles are legit and which are spam. Just a thought.

I understand where you are coming from, and in my presentation for this stuff I did discuss the idea of abuse. You make 2 points, I'll try to answer each:

1) Companies can pay a couple of writers with authority to give their links a boost.

I'm not sure if you mean pay the writers to write on the companies site, or to link to the companies site. However, it doesn't matter too much. An authoritative author is likely to be authoritative because they write good content, so its unlikely they'll start doing low-quality stuff.

If a writer begins writing on many different websites some what indiscriminately then Google will identify this and they'll find their AuthorRank decreasing, as their content on these sites gets a decreasing number of links and social shares.

2) Anyone can create a profile.

Sure, anyone can create a profile. However, making a profile authoritative isn't done so easily. Sure people can create many profiles and begin linking between them to try and build up authority. However, with Google+ these profiles are not a black box for Google - they will have a LOT of data about users to ascertain whether they are genuine users or not (just look at what they track in their new monthly reports).

So whilst I absolutely appreciate your point (thanks for raising it!), I don't think it'll be a massive problem. I'm sure some people will try, and some might succeed for a while, but the barrier to entry to spam with authorship markup is going to be significantly higher than un-authored links. That shifts the advantages towards the white-hat guys.

If rel author becomes cross platform (i.e you are not tied to Google+ as the identity service) then I imagine that will make it easier, but the point here will be that those IDs will be trusted less unless they are linked to a Google+ ID.

The number of people who think AuthorRank will be easily manipuated is interesting. I've gotten a number of those comments on my post about AuthorRank.

But it should conceivably be very hard. Here's why.

AuthorRank will be granted by topic

You won't be able to just grab Rand and have him write something about vaccuum cleaners and think that his AuthorRank is going to help you. Nor will links to those same vaccuum cleaner sites from his marketing related posts carry much weight. Like links, it's about neighborhoods and topical expertise.

AuthorRank will be hard to gain, easy to lose

In the Agent rank patents Google thought about the idea that AuthorRank would be difficult to gain but easy to lose. So abuse your influence and it goes away, fast.

AuthorRank is tied to identity

The prior point is important because this is YOU you're talking about. Google+ is an identity platform and one of the reasons Google wants 'real names' is because they want to have confidence that it's really you. Everything that you do is tracked and measured. Forget algorithmic penalties, how about having your identity penalized!

Imitation is easy to spot

Create another profile right? The problem here is that Google is tracking your social footprints throughout the Internet. Rapleaf got flak for this but Google was/is right there too. Just look at your Social Connections or think about how Google suggests other profiles for you within Google+.

Profiles that are newly minted and don't have a robust social footprint aren't going to be given much, if any, AuthorRank.

There will be instances where highly influential people within a vertical might be able to sell links (thereby conveying AuthorRank) but doing so too often will put thier AuthorRank at risk.

I read in your own article that Google filed a patent on "topical authorrank". But isn't it possible, that reality will hit them hard, and the possibility of infinitely many topics will make it impractical for them to use?

Teoma which was a theme baseb search engine, never made it to the succes people hoped for. Very likely because the definition of a topic is vague, making it hard to define algorithmically, and doesn't scale if you leave it to editors.

I don't see topics as a stumbling point. It should be relatively straight-forward to understand topics through NLP and big data. Sites like PeerIndex and Klout do this and they don't have nearly the sophistication or resources of Google.

Google will likely have a defined taxonomy of topics and then look to 'rank' authors under those topics. So, there probably won't be an authority on, say, purple jellyfish farmers, but there will for marine biology.